November 22, 2000
Wednesday, October 27, 2004, 10:17 PM
NYT Headline: "Florida Court Backs Hand Recounts and Orders Vote Deadline of Monday".

The ruling was unanimous. The court said that the secretary of state could not certify official results of the election until Sunday evening, and if the office was not open Sunday, the certification would have to take place Monday morning.

The scope of the secretary of state's discretion to ignore late county election returns in general was severely constrained in the ruling.

The opinion had some pretty quotable quotes in it (unlike the oral arguments). For example:

"Courts must not lose sight of the fundamental purpose of election laws: The laws are intended to facilitate and safeguard the right of each voter to express his or her will in the context of our representative democracy. Technical statutory requirements must not be exalted over the substance of this right."

No standards were set on which chads to count. Good thing, too, since all three counties doing recounts were using different standards which changed as the recounts progressed. Once again, I wistfully contemplate uniform national standards...

How were these legal challenges funded? By emergency fundraising, of course, by both parties. Gore raised $3 million within 24 hours of the polls closing on November 7; the Bush campaign started a few days later and had raised $4.6 million by the time the Florida court ruling came down.

Nowadays, everyone knows you have to get started much earlier than that.


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November 21, 2000 part 2
Wednesday, October 27, 2004, 09:59 PM
I'm trying vainly to find a quotable quote from the oral arguments in front of the Florida Supreme Court and failing. It wasn't just lack of sleep that made it difficult last night; it was the lack of sound-bytable material.

The questions centered around the Florida statue, 102.111 and 102.112. I vaguely remember looking them up and reading the fine print. What a waste of brain cells! (I lived in New York at the time.)

But here's why I looked it up.

Mr. Hancock: ...it is plainly set forth in the statute, that, in that recount, county officials should look at those ballots to determine the intent of the voter...

Justice Harding: But there is, also, a provision of that statute that says it should be done within seven days.

Mr. Hancock: Yes, Justice Harding, there is, and there is the following section, after that, that says that the first section you cite says they shall be done in seven days or not counted. The next section says they may be counted, if they are not done in seven days, so there is a conflict.

So the Court was stuck trying to figure out a schedule which would get the votes counted and get all challenges in court concluded by Dec. 12, as mandated by federal law.

Another choice bit:

Mr. Hancock: ...even if you leave aside the manual recount provisions, you have got a statutory system that does not contemplate that seven days brings down a curtain.

Justice Harding: What is the time limit, then?

Mr. Hancock: Well, Your Honor, if I were sitting in your chair, that would be a difficult question for me. It is an even more difficult question standing where I am.

A question no one wanted to answer because the only way to do it was to make up aschedule out of whole cloth.

You can relive those electrifying moments by listening to the arguments via the Florida Supreme Court's web site. Or you can just wait a few weeks for the remake.



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Recess appointment, anyone?
Wednesday, October 27, 2004, 10:12 AM
I was trying to convince a family member that a recess appointment to the Supreme Court is perfectly legal -- and after all, that's how Earl Warren got on the Court -- but he wasn't buying it. Maybe this article will convince him. It describes talk amongst administration officials about doing just that, should Rehnquist not be able to resume his duties after all. All very hush-hush, given the election, of course.

We probably have too many lawyers and judges involved in this mess already. But what we don't have is enough poll workers; we're short by about half a million nationwide. What happens when there aren't enough qualified volunteers?

"As long as they're breathing and they can walk in, we have to take them," says Barbara Jackson, Baltimore's director of elections. "The people we hire for the most part are elderly, undereducated, and frequently unemployed."

Another thing we're short on is absentee ballots arriving in the mail on time in Broward County. "Your ballot is in the mail" now joins the top ten things not to believe from a government official. That's about 58,000 folks who are wondering how they are going to vote. Enough to swing Florida?

At first I thought the absentee ballot story was on a parody site, since the other headlines included Man Accused Of Trying To Run Over Katherine Harris, (yes, *that* Katherine Harris), and right below that, Fishing Trip Unearths Mammoth Tooth, Other Fossils, but on second look it appears to be legit. Maybe they just have weirder news down there in Florida.


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November 21, 2000
Wednesday, October 27, 2004, 01:07 AM
NYT Headline: "Florida's Justices Zero In on Recount Deadlines".

I saw this oral argument live, on C-SPAN, though I can't remember now whether it was via Internet feed or on TV. I think it must have been Internet feed because I was most likely at work, not working, and distracting everyone else on the floor with the broadcast. Well, hell, it was an easy time to be distracted, with history in the making. C-SPAN must have gotten banner ratings that quarter.

Geez, I'm just too tired to try to dig out the good excerpts from the arguments now, given that it's 1 a.m. Consider this a placeholder for the rest of the article.

I will, however, quote from an editorial "Thanksgiving 2000".

"This is going to be a Thanksgiving to remember. Never had Americans had more to be grateful for. No matter what other burdens afflict us, at least we are not counting votes in Broward County.
...
Those of us who live in New York are planning to give thanks that we reside in a chad-free zone. After decades of complaining about the ancient voting machines, we suddenly appreciate our good fortune. Sure, they break down a lot, but they're really excellent when it comes to limiting the voters to one candidate per race. Legend has it that New York produces more election law litigation every year than the rest of the nation combined, but this month somebody else has finally taken away the title. Just the other day Broadway Democrats, a political club in Manhattan, was forced to send out fliers for its post-election symposium with the name of the speaker left blank. 'We couldn't find an election lawyer -- they're all in Florida,' explained one of the organizers."


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Short on sleep already
Wednesday, October 27, 2004, 12:34 AM
And there's still 6 days to go.

Tomorrow I *should* get up and be on a conference call at 8 am for the EIRS stuff. But I probably will sleep in and do the 6 pm call instead. I'm not even sure if that's my training session or not; it's hard to tell from the email I got.

But I did get a pointer to another spiffy training guide on the Verified Voting site. (Go to their site map and look under resources.) Forty-eight pages chock full of useful information for poll monitoring. I haven't read any of them yet because I was embroiled in legal news from another part of my life.

Today, the Iowa suit finally arrived; the Sixth Circuit overturned the lower court decision in Michigan so that voters there don't get their provisional ballots counted unless they are magically at the right precinct, a New Jersey judge refused to bar the use of electronic voting machines at this late date, a federal judge in FLorida ruled that people who failed to check the citizenship box on their voter registration forms even though they signed an affirmation of it elsewhere on the form are s.o.l.; and the Ohio Republican Party gets ready to sue county elections boards that reject GOP voter challenges because they were not properly filed.

I'm sure I left out some lawsuits. They'll keep til tomorrow.

Side note: if you run into some sites that require registration, do what I did: 1) download and install Firefox. See ww.mozilla.org. 2) Download and install the Bugmenot extension. See www.bugmenot.com for this. Restart your browser. Then, when you see the registration page, right click in the username field, and select "Bugmenot" from the menu. Once you see the fields magically filled in, click submit, if the page doesn't submit automatically. Now you're done!


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